Permanent Seismic Deformation of MSE Walls with Uneven Reinforcement

Among the six MSE earth walls tested on the National Geotechnical Centrifuge at the University of California, Davis, one wall (Wall 2) was provided with uneven reinforcement. There was no catastrophic failure observed in any of the six walls, even though the base excitation was as high as 0.9g. Wall 2 showed the lowest lateral displacement. A relatively simple rigid plastic model for predicting the seismic permanent displacement of MSE walls with uneven reinforcement is presented. It extends an existing model that was developed for MSE walls with uniform reinforcement. The variation of the acceleration in the backfill has been included since significant deamplification in acceleration was observed in the backfill in large excitations. The study reveals that the proposed analytical model captures many aspects of the characteristic behavior of MSE walls under seismic loading. Computed and measured lateral MSE wall displacements were compared and the agreement between them is very good.